[IPython-dev] Notebook filename badness

Thomas Kluyver takowl at gmail.com
Wed Jun 27 07:52:41 EDT 2012


Perhaps it will help to take a step back in this discussion.

At present, the notebook is useful either running locally or running
as a web application. People are using both, each has some
awkwardness, as you'd expect from something that was only released a
few months ago. On the local side, there are the problems with file
handling we've already discussed, while the web app lacks a proper
multi-user model for now.

As I understand it, what you're suggesting is that we steam ahead with
developing it as a web app, and give local users the choice of:
- Use files as we do already, but don't expect the problems to get fixed
- Use it like a web app running locally, and more or less ignore that
it creates files to store the notebooks (i.e. the hidden directory you
suggest)

My feeling is that the local app is an important but very different
use case, and we need to accommodate this properly. Ultimately, I
think we will need two different modes, or even two different
applications - perhaps "ipython notebook" and "ipython nbserver". It
will be a bit more code to maintain, but I think the benefit of
supporting both use cases well is worth the extra complexity.

Thanks,
Thomas



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